I remember exactly when I knew I didn't want to be a pure mathematician. It was the Spring of my sophomore year and I was knee-deep in a math major at Stanford. It was 2003 and everyone was a computer science (CS) major, either prepping to be shipped off to Google or doing their own startups....

A lot of the snappiness comes from good decisions on the backend. We use a lot of custom data structures and algorithms to keep a good ‘hot’ set of news items in memory, so backend newsfeed calls touch mostly in-memory items....

Machine learning (ML) is all the rage, riding tight on the coattails of the “big data” wave. Like most technology hype, the enthusiasm far exceeds the realization of actual products. Arguably, not since Google’s tremendous innovations in the late ’90s/early 2000s has algorithmic technology led to a product that has permeated the popular culture. ...